2016 Woman of Influence, Monique Jeanne Morrow Blogs

Honoree

Monique Jeanne Morrow
Woman of Influence

Currently the CTO-Evangelist for New Frontiers and Engineering, Monique Morrow served as the first CTO of Cisco Services from 2013 to 2014. Her journey at Cisco has taken her from Customer Advocacy to Corporate Consulting Engineering, with an emphasis on the Service Provider Segment.

Recognized and honored worldwide for her unwavering commitment to inclusion and diversity in the STEM space, Ms. Morrow believes it’s incumbent upon all of us to open the eyes of young girls to these exciting career opportunities. She explains that we need to help girls and young women realize that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is more than just coding – it’s the conduit to a wide range of fulfilling career options.

Beyond providing early exposure to STEM and giving girls encouragement to pursue opportunities in these fields, Ms. Morrow feels that we need to determine the causality of women leaving mid-career before hitting those higher levels of executive leadership. She is dedicated to implementing global, systemic changes to prevent the knowledge dearth that occurs as a result of women walking away from their careers.

Ms. Morrow credits her success as a global tech leader to her insatiable curiosity, eclectic background and fantastic male mentors. The modality of being able to solve problems using technology stoked her interest in the power of STEM opportunities. She emphasizes that developing female STEM leaders worldwide is contingent upon all of us to do outreach and support capacity building in our communities.

In this age of digitization and the merging of sectors, Ms. Morrow has seen the emergence of The Internet of Women (IoW). She feels that a female perspective is a critical underpinning of this new wave of technologies. A comprehensive look at IoW can be found in the soon-to-be released book The Internet of Women, Accelerating Culture Change. Ms. Morrow edited this publication that is a collaborative effort of Cisco and the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT).

She has been recognized among the Top Ten Influential IT Women in Europe and was one of six Global Achievers recognized for the ITU and UN Women GEM-TECH Award in 2014. Ms. Morrow was also selected to be part of the elite group of women for Connected World magazine’s 2015 Women of M2M/Internet of Things feature (WoM2M). She is co-WISE Executive Sponsor at Cisco, as well as an advocate for Cisco Women in Technology and Cisco Women for Cybersecurity Communities.

Ms. Morrow has also been published in IEEE and other journals. She speaks frequently at conferences, and has co-authored three books, further demonstrating her commitment to global awareness of women in STEM. With an extensive education at numerous universities worldwide, she received her MBA from the City University-Seattle Zurich, Switzerland Program.